The Strange Life of Things

6 April 2025 – 4 January 2026
Curated by Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood, in collaboration with the artist

“We are water. To speak with water is to speak with our body, with our dreams, and with our dead.”
— Valeria Luiselli

At Palazzo Grassi, the Pinault Collection presents a major exhibition project dedicated to the Franco-Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé (born in 1968 in Cosenza, Italy), curated by Caroline Bourgeois, chief curator at the Pinault Collection, and James Lingwood, independent curator and former co-director of Artangel.
 Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, this monographic exhibition—the most extensive solo show ever dedicated to Tatiana Trouvé and her first major exhibition in Italy—is an ambitious and complex response to the carte blanche invitation extended by the Pinault Collection to key figures in contemporary international art.
The spaces of Palazzo Grassi serve as the starting point for the creation of new sculptures, a group of large-scale drawings, and site-specific installations, presented in dialogue with works from the past decade. Together, they offer multiple perspectives into the worlds of Tatiana Trouvé. The exhibition is further enriched by important works from the Pinault Collection, international museums, and private collections, as well as from the artist’s archive.

The constellation of works by Tatiana Trouvé that occupy the three floors of Palazzo Grassi guides visitors through inner and outer worlds where dreams, memories, and visions converge. Images and objects appear and reappear in different spaces and settings, shifting from two to three dimensions and back again. Moving between a pre-human past, a turbulent present, and a speculative future, Tatiana Trouvé invites visitors into a captivating spatial, temporal, and mental labyrinth.

With thanks to Gagosian for their support.
 The exhibition is supported by Pomellato.

Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood: Could you tell us about the quote by Astrida Neimanis that appears on the wall of your studio: “The sea that is now in your body may once have been a river, may once have been part of an ocean”?
Tatiana Trouvé: It’s a quote I like very much. The water contained in our body suggests that we are aquatic beings, that we come from water but also that we will return to it, and that our death will be an evaporation. The water we contain may circulate and, unless enclosed in a coffin, might nourish the roots of trees whose tops, rising up to the clouds, will give rise to rain. Our water would mix with that which flows to streams, rivers, seas, and all that is alive. It’s an aquatic symbiosis, inscribed in the cycle of life, and on a metaphysical level, as Deleuze said, it implies that “only organisms die, never life.”

CB/JL: How does all this influence the way you envisioned the exhibition at Palazzo Grassi?
TT: The whole exhibition is tied to this dynamic, to this regeneration, to the movements and transformations that allow what appears to reappear elsewhere, in a different way, in a cycle akin to that of life. The work located in the atrium of Palazzo Grassi is also literally connected to the phenomenon of water circulation: visitors are welcomed by an asphalt floor in which stone and metal manhole covers are embedded, along with other elements that are part of the urban landscape—such as pedestrian crossings or metal plates used in roadworks.

CB/JL: Most of the objects you “use” have a history. They once belonged to a city, to a person, to a body. How important is the idea of recovering or re-creating something that has already existed elsewhere to you?
TT: Over the years, I’ve developed the habit of collecting objects, scraps, and fragments of things that bear traces of time linked to accidental events, alterations, or uses that reflect their way of existing. I’ve built a sort of atlas of these objects, which I recreate in various materials—bronze, metal, stone, concrete, plaster, foam rubber—and with which I’ve lived for years. They can change identity as soon as they are reproduced in a material that transforms them and brings them into the ecosystem of my work, feeding new narratives in which they adapt to one another. We find them in sculptures or installations, but they can also remain for years on the shelves of my studio, until they become part of it—as if they had a life of their own.

CB/JL: Some objects have recurred in your work for years—for example, women’s shoes, blankets, suitcases, keys. What do they mean to you?
TT: These are things connected by a relationship with a world in motion. I associate shoes with the act of walking and thinking, suitcases, blankets, and pillows with the acts of inhabiting and traveling, and keys with the ability to open and close, to move from inside to outside. These objects serve as links, as bridges for building narratives—even if those narratives might mislead us. They are recurring elements that allow my work to open up to multiple stories, leading toward other worlds. Worlds that are not my own, tied to thoughts that go beyond my practice but that nonetheless nourish it, as shown by other objects—the works of authors whose titles I engrave on stone books. Mobility is not necessarily tied to speed, particularly in my way of working, but in the play of elements, nothing is immutable. Even the materials I use most often are not, contrary to common belief: bronze undergoes continuous oxidation over time; it can deteriorate. Stone carries within it a history that erodes slowly. The unease also comes from the intertwining of these many movements.

“Things have their own memory, just as we have ours. Only, they don’t speak. But by listening to them, something can be understood.”
— Orhan Pamuk